3 Ways to Be Constantly Recruiting Star Talent Through Social Media The search for talent is an integral part of a well-developed social media branding strategy.
By Joe Budzienski Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Every month 288 million people use Twitter, 300 million use Instagram and 890 million a day use Facebook. Social platforms, with the largest audiences available, have become marketing platforms, and not just for clothes and kitchen appliances. Hiring managers and recruiters are increasingly turning to the social web to market their companies to job seekers.
"Social hiring'' to source candidates is a rapidly emerging recruitment strategy. Companies are using social networks and other platforms, such as GitHub for software developers or Dribble for designers. Yet many companies still don't understand how critical it is to their success.
In this new, post-recession economy there is no such thing as a passive candidate. Everyone is a candidate all the time. The challenge is how to reach them. Millennials, especially, think about their employment differently than previous generations. They are like athletes joining professional teams, staying only as long as the relationship benefits both. It's not just millennials relying on the social web to find opportunities, but job seekers of all stripes. To keep up with seekers, recruiters must understand and utilize social for recruiting with a focus on building and reinforcing their talent brand in that space.
Related: Why Millennials Are Immature, Entitled and the Best Hire
At Monster, we've prioritized social hiring through Twitter, which is one of the fastest growing social networks for recruiting. On average, more than 60,000 jobs are tweeted each day on the platform. With its huge, engaged professional audience and heavily public user-to-user access, Twitter is being utilized by about 40 percent of companies to source talent.
Other platforms are being used for social hiring too — 54 percent of recruiters use Facebook, 8 percent use Google+ and YouTube; and 4 percent now use Pinterest, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Savvy hiring mangers and recruiters are experimenting with ways of leveraging the social web to source talent and expose their employer brand. Here are three critical things all companies should already be doing:
1. Focus on your social talent brand.
A company's talent brand is how their mission, vision and corporate culture are perceived on the social web. That plays a significant and vastly under appreciated role in reducing a business' cost to hire and its ability to attract quality candidates. Google, for example, does a great job of talent branding. They look like a great place to work and that's become their biggest asset in hiring. Make sure your company's image, in words, photos and videos, is consistent across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and other platforms.
Related: How Recruiters Creepily Troll Social Media for Job Candidates (Infographic)
2. Enable your employees to evangelize.
The most effective way to draw candidates to you is to have employees spreading the word that the company is a great place to work. Empower them to Tweet and blog about their work and the office culture, post photos on the company's Tumblr and engage on the corporate Facebook page. According to a 2014 survey from Monster, 65 percent of respondents would consider an opportunity for a new job if they learned about it from a personal connection.
3. Cultivate positive exposure across the social web.
Your company should be celebrating itself by putting out a variety of written and visual content, such as posts on a corporate blog or photos of events and everyday happenings at the office on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (with corresponding hashtags like #officeparty or #teamouting). That could be a photo of your modern office space or a six-second Vine video of a recent, raucous staff meeting. Update what's happening in your industry and in your company, and consistently post your available job, on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
Obviously, you won't be able to do this if you don't have a corporate culture where employees are thriving, but assuming you do, you should be talking about it — socially. The more positive exposure you cultivate for your company across the web, the more great talent will come looking for you.
Related: How to Hire Without Spending a Fortune. (Hint: Use Social Media.)
